Vladimir Lenin

Table of Contents

Context

Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov on April 22, 1870,
to an upper-middle class family in the Russian town of Simbirsk,
on the Volga River. His father was an inspector of schools, and
died in 1886. The next year his older brother, Alexander, was
executed for taking part in a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander
III. After his brother's death, the young Vladimir took up his
revolutionary ways.

While still a teenager, Lenin was expelled from college
for taking part in a political demonstration. For several years
he lived with relatives, studying law and reading revolutionary
literature, especially the writings of Karl Marx, which predicted
an imminent revolt by the working class, or proletariat, that would
usher in a classless society. In 1891 he passed his law examinations,
but his law practice quickly took a backseat to his revolutionary
activity, as he began to make a name for himself within the world
of Russian Marxism.

Lenin was arrested in 1895, sent to jail, and later exiled
to Siberia, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya, whom he had known in
the St. Petersburg underground movement. During this period, the
first Russian Marxist political party was founded, the Russian Social
Democratic Labour Party, or Social Democrats. When his exile ended,
in 1900, Lenin went abroad to Western Europe, where he was joined
by Krupskaya, and began to publish a revolutionary newspaper, Iskra (The
Spark), which fellow revolutionaries smuggled into Russia. Meanwhile,
in 1903 the Social Democrats held their second Congress, in Brussels
and London, and there the party split in two, forming a radical
group, the Bolsheviks (Majority), and a more moderate group, the
Mensheviks (Minority). Lenin, who advocated an elite group of
revolutionaries rather than a larger, more broad-based party, took
up leadership of the Bolsheviks.

Until 1917, Lenin and Krupskaya traveled around Europe,
agitating and organizing for a revolution they believed to be inevitable.
(During this time, he met Inessa Armand, a Bolshevik agitator
who was to become his closest friend– and possibly his lover.)
In Russia, Tsar Nicholas II's government survived the 1905 Revolution
by agreeing to the formation of a representative body called the "Duma,"
but the stresses brought on by Russia's involvement in World War
I proved too great for the struggling autocracy. In 1917, the
Russian Revolution toppled the Tsarist government, and Lenin returned
from exile in Switzerland, thanks to the intervention of the Germans,
who allowed him to travel through the war zone in a sealed train.
From March until November of 1917, Russia was ruled by a Provisional
Government, which made plans for a democratically elected assembly.
A number of miscalculations, however, along with the strain of
continuing the war with Germany, paved the way for a Bolshevik coup in
November of 1917.

Lenin led the new government, which quickly made peace
with the Germans and conducted a bloody civil war against the "Whites,"
a loose collection of armies united only by their opposition to
Bolshevism. Those fighting on the side of the government were
known as the "Reds." After much violence, the Reds won, largely
thanks to the work of Leon Trotsky, a former Menshevik, who organized
the Red Army. In this struggle, Lenin ordered the use of brutal
tactics, against Whites but also civilians, as he put into bloody
practice the Marxist ideas of class warfare. The campaign became
known as the "Red Terror", and saw the murders of thousands of
Russian peasants, and the consignment of thousands more into concentration
camps as "enemies of the revolution." Lenin's accompanying economic
innovations then caused a terrible famine, in 1921, which killed
nearly 5 million people.

By 1922, Lenin was the ruler of a united Russia, however wretched,
which was renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. However,
he suffered two strokes in 1922, and a third in 1923 that robbed
him of the power of speech. He survived another year before passing
away on January 21, 1924. He was succeeded by Joseph Stalin,
whose influence Lenin had warned against before his death, and
who would soon emerge as one of the bloodiest tyrants in the 20th
century. Meanwhile, Lenin acquired the status of a secular saint,
and his embalmed body was placed in Moscow's Red Square as a national
shrine. His reputation survived, if only in the writings of Soviet
propaganda, until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, when
to criticize the founder of the communist state no longer constituted
a crime.